Got in a couple days of hand trolling the past two days. Had my best days for coho hand trolling in my second year, two days in a row. My friend Gordy had his best day yesterday, too, fishing south of me, and he’s been hand trolling a long time.
And wow, is my back sore from cleaning because my cleaning trough is too low. Got to take tomorrow off at least. Now that I don’t need the money, my health takes priority over fish checks, and my back needs to be in good shape to go elk hunting with Roy in about a month.
The fish were coming about as fast as I want to have them come yesterday for awhile. I had to quit pulling fish and just clean, and in doing so, realized I should let the lines load up with fish like that all the time as the fish on the hooks attract other fish to hooks without a fish. I had four fish on each side – with the only hooks not with a fish were fouled and maybe one of the hootchie hooks was bare. Of course, fish could have got on and off with all the soak time as I was cleaning the other fish.
Coho dock price from my buyer is $3.50/lb, so the pay checks are somewhat stunning just for catching the coho with cannon manual downriggers rigged for trolling.
Of course, I lost the first fish of the day and the last. Both hogs. And I think each time – there goes 35 bucks.
Still refining my little troll show. Realized I can just take out one of the benches behind the captain seats and put the cooler there, instead of having it in the way all the time, so that’s one of the next projects. I must get some welding done for better mounting of the downriggers, too.
I started off just fishing flashers and hootchies as that’s what I’d been catching coho on sport fishing. I put in an orange spoon here and there as well. When I saw the coho start to hit the spoons, I swapped the flashers to spoons, except for some 4 inch flashers I got from Cabelas to try. They seem to work okay at times, and create no drag on the wire like the bigger flashers do.
Yesterday a humpback whale surfaced right next to me, then started cutting in front of me. I yelled to him or her, and she seemed to hear me and dove across my bow at a safe distance.